Abbey's Road: The dumbphone dilemma

I still remember the first text message I ever received on a dumbphone. It was from my college roommate, asking me to bring her an orange Gatorade on my way back from class.

I stared at my tiny cell phone screen for a minute and blinked in the blinding Northeast Ohio sunshine. A message? On a screen? Without talking? Brilliant!

I am the girl who, as a child, never wanted to order for herself at restaurants because it required vocalizing my preferred cuisine to a waiter, and who later in life questioned her choice of journalism as a major because it would mean talking to strangers for a living.

Thankfully, journalism stuck; so did text messaging.

This was before smartphones existed, and even slide-out keypads were a rarity. You had to send text messages — believe it or not, Whippersnappers (she said, pushing her bifocals up on her nose) — by pressing multiple times on a single number in order to arrive at the letter you wanted.

If you bypassed that letter by accident, you had to press through every letter and number represented by that key before you got back to your chosen letter. If two letters in a row required the same key, you had to wait for the first letter to stop flashing before you could enter the next.

If you accidentally selected the all caps option, you were basically text-yelling at your recipient — DO YOU WANT ME TO BRING CHIPS TO DINNER TONIGHT? — and your mom would call a second later to see why you were having such a bad day and reassure you that no, chips will not be necessary.

Since I remain the proud owner of a dumbphone, I am able to rekindle these memories by texting Old School Style — which comes in handy when I have one hand tied up with a 16-month-old throwing a tantrum because she has to wear shoes on a 35-degree day.

Earlier this week I was getting ready to send a text to Mr. Roy about lunch. Without paying attention, I typed the message one-handed in Old School Mode. It read: “Wamt t gdt jtmag tdaw!”

So he made me a ham sandwich, not understanding that I was clearly ordering peanut butter and jelly.

One problem I’ve noticed with Old School Texting is a lack of ability to fully express intention using emojis.

You get a colon, semicolon, hyphen, backslash and parentheses. Also the letter D if you’re in a really good mood. That’s it.

No shrugging woman with a purple shirt; no string of chili peppers; no Australian flag. If I’m wearing a purple shirt and feel like eating spicy food while on sabbatical in Australia, well, I’m just going to have to use words, and who DOES that?

I need emojis in order to read between the lines. (That’s the most millennial sentence I’ve written in a long time.)

Mr. Roy, on the other hand, does not. He has the peevish habit of responding to every text message with the same two letters: “Ok”. No punctuation, no sideways smiley faces, no “haha.” Nothing.

When I get a text that says “Ok”, a million things go through my mind: Is that a happy Ok? A mad Ok? An, “I’m being abducted by aliens can you please come rescue me” Ok? Use your emoticons, for pity’s sake.

I like to proof my texts three times for punctuation and tone, all the time asking myself, “Does this come across as excessively tempramental/jubilant/vague/paranoid? If so, what combination of colons, parentheses and backslashes can I insert to make it sound friendlier?”

And then I correct as necessary.

I guess I could always call. But who DOES that?

Not me.

Abbey Roy is a mom of three girls who make every day an adventure. She writes to maintain her sanity. You can probably reach her at amroy@nncogannett.com, but responses are structured around bedtimes and weekends.